Interesting notes on our evaluations.

We have been evaluating online backup services for a couple of our customers as part of the backup archive solutions we provide. The larger and leading online backup providers are the obvious and logic ones for us to start with.

Frankly, we have been very disappointed after we tried Mozy and Carbonite against some of the requirements from our clients. I have not personally subscribed to those services before. One of the top requirements from our client is that the backed up files should be preserved permanently if they choose to. What amazed me is that almost all online backup services will delete a backup file a short period of time after the file is deleted from your local computer. I just don’t get the logic behind. The answer from them is that “we are online backup service instead of online storage”. I guess I am totally lost after so many years in this industry. Isn’t Backup supposed to protect you from accidental data loss? If I lose my files accidentally for any reason, my backup won’t be able to rescue me? The argument is absolutely a joke in my opinion. Imaging a company wants to keep all their employees’ work even after they leave the company. I bet you most people clean up their computers before they leave, could mostly be their personal files, but still they could delete files related to work by accident. The company will not be able to retrieve those files deleted. Unfortunately, this is one of our clients’ top requirements.

There are other requirements not met too but we have to eliminate guys like Mozy and Carnonite for this reason. Now we have to turn our eyes to something else which can better meet the requirements.

Great pleasure to be here.

First, I’d like to say hi to everyone. It is a great pleasure to start my blog here.

I have been looking at Online Backup recently and I’d like to share some of my findings.

Online backup sounds to be a great concept and many online backup services have been in business for a while. The leaders include Mozy and Carbonite. I personally think that everyone should have some kind of backup strategy and online backup should be a great option for most. The technology is mature enough for online backup and the user base is there. But it doesn’t seem to me that online backup has gained enough attention from consumers.

One of the interesting things I noticed is the price model of most online services. Most of them offer a flat fee for “Unlimited” storage. Sounds pretty good, right? But let’s take a close look at “Unlimited”, is it really unlimited? I evaluated the features of a few online backup applications, surprisingly; almost all the services who claim to offer “Unlimited” storage don’t support “versioning”, which I believe is a critical feature for a “backup” solution. Almost all “unlimited” storage backup services are really one-way folder synchronization instead of backup. If you delete a file from your local drive, the backed up files will be deleted from the backup servers. This makes “Unlimited” claim misleading because there is no way your storage usage can exceed your local drive capacity. It is understandable why the services providers do this because they don’t want your storage usage to be out of control.

I think it is important for consumers to be aware of those when you choose an online backup service.  We looked at some individual services and online backup applications and I will follow up with some more information in my later posts.